What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that "common manual labour," as Mr. Hillquit puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," apart from the "organisation and control" of the minds most competent to direct it? That the more intellectual socialists of to-day do recognise this fact--some with greater and some with less distinctness--is the very point on which I am anxious to insist. We shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question. Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves, whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy in which they no longer believe? Do they do this? Do they make an attempt to do this? On the contrary, as a rule, though there are doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the multitude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]